At Ickworth Park Primary School we value reading as a crucial life skill. By the time children leave us, they read confidently for meaning and regularly enjoy reading for both pleasure and purpose. 

We use the systematic synthetic phonics programme (SSP) ‘Little Wandle: Letters & Sounds Revised’ at Ickworth Park. The programme is designed to teach children to read from Reception to Year 2, using the skill of decoding and blending sounds together to form words. Little Wandle provides a full progression through all commonly occurring GPCs (sounds), working from simple to more complex, and taking into account the frequency of their occurrence in the most commonly encountered words.

The teaching of phonics is fast-paced, and we encourage all children to actively participate in each lesson, enabling them to develop the fundamental skills to become confident and fluent readers. Reading and writing are essential life skills and we are dedicated to enabling our children to become enthused, engaged and successful lifelong readers and writers. To support this we implement the following:

- Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Year 1

- Phonics is taught for up to 30 minutes a day. In Reception, we build from 10-minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, to the full-length lesson as quickly as possible.

- Every Friday, we review the week’s teaching to help children become fluent readers.

- Children make a strong start in Reception: teaching begins in Week 1 of the Autumn term.

We follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised expectations of progress:

- Children in Reception are taught to read and spell words using Phase 2 and 3 GPCs, and words with adjacent consonants (Phase 4) with fluency and accuracy.

- Children in Year 1 review Phase 3 and 4 and are taught to read and spell words using Phase 5 GPCs with fluency and accuracy.

- Daily keep-up lessons ensure every child becomes a confident and fluent reader. 

Ensuring consistency and pace of progress:

· All teachers and TAs in our school has been trained to teach phonics.

· We all use the same language, routines and resources to teach children to read so that we lower children’s cognitive load.

· Weekly content grids map each element of new learning to each day, week and term for the duration of the programme.

· Lesson templates, prompt cards and how to videos ensure teachers all have a consistent approach and structure for each lesson.

Assessment

Assessment is used to monitor progress and to identify any child needing additional support as soon as they need it.

Assessment for learning is used daily within class to identify children needing keep-up support. Children are assessed weekly in the review lesson to assess gaps. Adults can address these immediately and secure fluency of GPCs, words and spellings.

Summative assessment is used every three-six weeks to assess progress, identify gaps in learning that need to be addressed, identify any children needing additional support and to plan keep-up support. These sessions match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures, resources and mantras, but in smaller steps with more repetition, so that every child secures their learning. These sessions can be 1:1 or in small groups.

In addition to this, we timetable additional phonics lessons for any child in Year 2 who is not fully fluent at reading or has not met the expectation of the Phonics Screening Check in Year 1. These children catch up, so the gap between themselves and their peers does not widen. We continue to use Little Wandle assessments to identify the gaps in phonic knowledge. 

Statutory assessment

Children in Year 1 sit the Phonics Screening Check in June. Any child not passing the check receives additional support and re-sits it in Year 2.

Ensuring reading for pleasure

We value reading for pleasure highly and work hard as a school to grow our Reading for Pleasure ethos.

• We read to children every day. We choose these books carefully as we want children to experience a wide range of books, including books that reflect the children at Ickworth Park, our local community and books that open windows into other worlds and cultures.
• Every classroom has an inviting book corner that encourages a love for reading. We curate these books to entice children to read a wide range of books.
• In Reception, children have access to the reading corner every day in their continuous provision and the books are regularly refreshed.
• Children from Reception onwards have a home reading record. The parent/carer records comments to share with the adults in school and the adults will check this on a regular basis to ensure reading is being done at home as well as in school.
• Library visits are timetabled across the week for all year groups.